COLOGNE – How does a media company stay abreast of and adopt new technologies to best effect. For many, the answer is to create a “lab”, a division whose sole purpose is to let in-house geeks test out and apply transformational new tech.
And IPG Mediabrands is no different. Its IPG Media Lab is devoted to finding new ways to solve marketing problems by applying the latest technologies.
IPG Media Lab strategy director Adam Simon tells Beet.TV his unit has struck a number of partnerships with up-and-coming marketing tech outfits, including to service the changing nature of out-of-home, location-based and TV advertising.
Partners include location enablers Yext and Placed; computer vision outfit Admobilize, whose technology can figure out a household’s income level by identifying the car they are driving, and Samba, automated content recognition technology that can identify what viewers are watching in order to retarget them on a range of devices.
“A lot of the changing consumption of TV that we’re seeing is being driven by technology – either people streaming content or watching traditional television on different devices,” Simon tells Beet.TV.
“We need to use technology to solve the problem of people watching TV in different ways. Location-based technologies are trying to open up and unlock new kinds of media and more precise targeting.
“Technology has infused itself in a lot of different ways – some o f those are opportunities and some of them are challenges; we’re looking at both of them at the same time.”
